[RGB]⇒ PDF The Mandarins Harper Perennial Modern Classics Simone De Beauvoir 9780007203949 Books

The Mandarins Harper Perennial Modern Classics Simone De Beauvoir 9780007203949 Books

Download As PDF : The Mandarins Harper Perennial Modern Classics Simone De Beauvoir 9780007203949 Books

The Mandarins Harper Perennial Modern Classics Simone De Beauvoir 9780007203949 Books

The Mandarins is an interesting look into the lives of French intellectuals trying to rebuild the world in a post WWII environment. Beauvoir's account closely follows the lives of Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Nelson Algren. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the lives of French Existentialists, post-WWII French culture, or, just a good read.

My favorite part of the novel was Beauvoir's focus on the role of an intellectual. Each character has a different opinion. Each opinion changes over the course of seemingly endless setbacks. Some give in to despair. Others rebel against their circumstances.


Tags : The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) [Simone De Beauvoir] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A Harper Perennial Modern Classics reissue of this unflinching examination of post-war French intellectual life,Simone De Beauvoir,The Mandarins (Harper Perennial Modern Classics),Harpercollins Pub Ltd,0007203942,Modern fiction,Fiction

The Mandarins Harper Perennial Modern Classics Simone De Beauvoir 9780007203949 Books Reviews

Book was in really bad shape and smelled.
Simone writes about love like no one else.
In perfect state!
Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins is the best book I have read in years.
The Saturday Review; "There is no doubt about the brilliance of the mind behind the writing of The Mandarins" Do not miss it!
Roda Lerpold
Hard to get into and understand, requires knowledge of French history and literary figures at the time.
❤️ I was impressed by the amazing condition this edition was in!
As someone with an antipathy to existentialism, feminism, the French and soap operas, I came to Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins expecting to find myself loathing the experience. My attitude turned around quite rapidly because of the writing, the plotting and the fascination of watching the internal debates of French leftists who were coming to terms with the recent impotence of their nation and, consequently, their own irrelevance in the face of the upstart, gauche Americans. (See p. 516 ["Admitting that you belong to a fifth rate nation and an outmoded era is not something that you can do overnight."].)

I thought that De Beauvior's writing - or at least this translation - was excellent. The sentences were fairly simple and direct, and there were frequent instances where de Beauvior's observations were charming. For example, after Nadine, the daughter of Anne Dubrieulh - the first person narrator/de Beauvior figure - joins the Communist Party, Anne observes that "[Nadine] soon began examining all my acts and words in the light of historical materialism." (p. 197.)

Kids will do that.

The plotting is first-rate. De Beauvior uses a technique where she employs two perspectival characters -Henri Perron and Anne Dubrieulh. When Henri Perron - the Albert Camus figure - is the central character, the story is narrated in the third person; when Anne Dubrieulh is the central character, the story moves to a first person narrative. The change in writing perspective is interesting because de Beauvior will sometimes "loop back" to cover scenes and times that Henri had previously narrated, and we see the same scene told from Anne's perspective.

The soap opera of the book focuses on Henri and Anne's interactions with other people. Henri is the editor/publisher/co-owner of a newspaper started under the Resistance named L'Espoir (the "Hope.") Henri is married to Paula, who he seems to be fond of but finds her cloying love for him to be stifling him. Henri has to work through the question of whether he will keep L'Espoir an independent Leftist newspaper or be sucked into the plans of Robert Dubrieulh ("Dubrieulh") - the Jean Paul Sartre analog - to turn L'Espoir into the house propaganda organ of Dubrieulh's political party/movement, the S.R.L, which Dubrieulh conceives as a broad leftist front aligned with the Communist Party, but not Communist. Henri succumbs to the force of Dubrieulh's personality and his apparent submissiveness to Dubrielh, and then regrets that decision when the issue of whether to print an expose about the Soviet death camps splits Dubrieulh and Henri, with Dubrieulh judging that it would be far worse to give aid and comfort to Anti-Communists than to allow the death camps to continue, and Henri having some residual adherence to an idea of a commitment to truth that transcends politics.

Through the long political ratiocinations, we see Henri philander. First, he has an affair with the Dubrieulh's eighteen year old daughter, Nadine, then he takes up with a Quisling wanna-be actress - which results in him perjuring himself for a Nazi collaborator - and then he returns to Nadine, who connives at trapping Henri in a marriage by getting pregnant. Nadine goes from Henri to Henri's younger friend Lambert. Lambert goes from a leftist journalist to a right wing newspaperman. Paula, Henri's wife, goes from being a woman in the grips of obsessive compulsion about her husband, to out and out insanity on the same subject, but, fortunately, she is saved by psycho-analysis before the book ends.

Anne's story was less interesting and seems to be mostly about Anne's obsession with Anne. Anne has sex with Scriazine - the Arthur Koestler analog - which seems fairly meaningless. She goes to America, plots having sex with the husband of a couple she is staying with, but then meets Lewis, an American writer, with whom she becomes infatuated. She goes on for pages about how wonderful love is, and how great it is to be loved for a woman her age - she is a 39 year old dowager - and then when the embers of passion die down for Lewis, Anne goes on for pages about the hurt of not being loved for a woman her age and contemplates suicide. This material might be pure gold for soap opera lovers, but it did not impress me, largely because I felt that Anne had no clue what she was talking about; her idea of love seemed to be a kind of unexamined narcissism. I, frankly, became annoyed with Anne and puzzled by de Beauvior's approach to feminism. Anne is a psycho-analyst, but she permits herself to be talked to as if she was a child by Lewis. At one point, Lewis advises her that he is "going to wind up believing that there is a brain inside that little skull." (p. 477.) As noted in other reviews, based on this book, where the women seem to identify their value in reference to what men they have attached themselves to, it seems that de Beauvior had a rather misogynistic view of her sex.

The plotting of all this was excellent. For example, de Beauvior introduces the poison that Anne will contemplate taking at the end of the book in an earlier scene involving Anne and Paula. There is a character named Marie Ange who cons an interview out of Henri, which seems like a puzzling throw-away scene, but the effects of the story published from that interview will be seen at different times throughout the book. Marie Ange pops up unexpectedly at different points. I enjoyed seeing how her life developed over time.

However, what caught my interest was the historical value of the book. The book keeps time to historical events - the retreat of the Germans out of France, the surrender of Germany, the use of the Atomic bomb, the Malagasy Uprising of 1947 - and shows the attitude of French intellectuals to these events.

A large part of the book is taken up by the problem of the Communist Party. The problem is that Henri's coterie of intellectuals wanted to be Communists but they didn't want to make a full commitment to Communism, much less anything else. They want to have their cake and eat it, too, but the Communists won't permit a left that is not under their control or which refuses to permit itself to be used as patsies. The big issue for non-Communist intellectuals seems to have been whether they should support the United States or the Soviet Union. It seems that for most, there never was a question about supporting the Soviet Union over the United States - of course, they were going to support the Soviet Union (p. 584) - but this allegiance seems to have been more a matter of conformity to class expectation. What we get from reading The Mandarins seems to be that the French Left made most of its decisions based on projecting their attitudes on their enemies. Thus, on a number of different occasions, Henri and his friend describe their fear and loathing about becoming a colony of the United States. This fear and loathing is never expressed in terms of what the Americans will do - except that Americans are somehow uncivilized and uncultured (they will never be able to control themselves with their Atom bomb (p. 241) - but there are descriptions about what it means to be a colonized power, specifically a colony of the French during the Malagasy Uprising. Being a colony of France is not an attractive option. I got the sense that the French intellectuals were basically saying something like, "gosh, we know how we act when we are the colonizers, so why should those Americans act any better?"

Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.

Of course, for all their talk of guilt and questions about how they should live, none of these people are ever seen as donating to charity, feeding the poor, or doing anything constructive about the plight of the hungry. Henri does permit himself to be used as a front man for a committee established by the Communist Party to condemn France's mistreatment of rebel politicians after the suppression of the Malagasy Uprising (p. 576), but it is part of the sloth typical of the French intellectual left that this is not a project initiated by Henri. Ironically, Henri agrees to act as the front man by a Communist who slandered him previously. The Communist explains that the slander was "just business" which he had to do for the Party. Apparently, Henri accepts the idea that party loyalty trumps honesty and good manners.

We also see the development of the Anti-Communist Left, which leads some former fellow travellers to move into conservative circles. Scriazzine - a refugee from Eastern Europe - takes the leading oar in attempting to get his colleagues to take an interest in the violation of human rights on the left, mostly to no avail. Lambert gets fed up with the mealy-mouth temporizing of Dubrieulh concerning the thuggishness of the Communist Party and eventually aligns with the conservative writer Volange - about whom it is stipulated that he is somehow unworthy simply because he is conservative and seems to drink too much, albeit he is polite to Henri at social occasions. Because of the Communist Party's own policies, anarchists were forced to choose between communism and "Gaullism." (p. 584.)

In short, what we see throughout The Mandarins is the demonizing of the Other that existentialism and Sarte were supposed to have condemned. The book exposes the "bad faith" of the French non-Communist intellectual left who are not living a life of autonomy; they are making decisions based on whether it will antagonize the Communist Party against them or will give aid to people who they feel are even worse than the adherents of philosophy with death camps, i.e., if it will give comfort to the right.

In other words, the characters in The Mandarins are nothing if not about "buying grace on the cheap" rather than choosing to make a tough decision that will force them to break with their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life and their genteel egotism.

Henri is the archetype of this bad faith. Everything he does involves temporizing based on the feelings of other people. He does write an expose of the Soviet death camps, but he waters it down as much as he can. He wants to maintain the autonomy of L'Espoir, but he doesn't want to offend Dubrieulh. He permits himself to commit perjury for his Quisling lover.

I wondered throughout the book if this was the message that de Beauvior intended to communicate. I can't imagine that it was, although the bad faith of the left circa World War II is similarly attested to in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia where it seemed that so long as the form of a socialist society was maintained, the fact that the government was permitting the murder of priests and the burning of churches, and the Communists were using private torture facilities to punish their political enemies was a problem of means, not ends. Ultimately, Henri and Dubrieulh agree that their own temporizing and desire to have their cake and eat it too, to be autonomous heroes of conscience who make sure that they don't fall out of favor with the right sort of people, proves that "personal morality just doesn't exist." (p. 518.)

Was it de Beauvior's intent to leave a massive text showing the flaws and limitations of the non-communist Marxist worldview? I am not sure, but that seems to be what she did.
The Mandarins is an interesting look into the lives of French intellectuals trying to rebuild the world in a post WWII environment. Beauvoir's account closely follows the lives of Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Nelson Algren. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the lives of French Existentialists, post-WWII French culture, or, just a good read.

My favorite part of the novel was Beauvoir's focus on the role of an intellectual. Each character has a different opinion. Each opinion changes over the course of seemingly endless setbacks. Some give in to despair. Others rebel against their circumstances.